EMC has reported a record high in the number of global phishing attacks. This they say, was influenced by the spread of phishing to additional geographic regions and new verticals, including for the first time both Australia and New Zealand appearing in the regional breakdown of attacked global banking brands.

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In addition, the Rock Phish spam emails were in prevalence during the month of March. The notorious Rock Phish gang is a group of cyber criminals thought to be responsible for up to 50 per cent of the world’s phishing attacks. The Rock Phish gang creates and sends spam emails using specific features in combination that enable them to both avoid detection and increase the volume of hits to their website to levels beyond those of other phishing sites.

According to a number of other security experts Rock Phish pioneered image spam: the technique of sending e-mail messages in graphic files in order to bypass spam filters, according to security experts. The gang uses ‘hash busters’, which add random text to each email message in order to create a unique message, making it difficult for anti-spam filters to qualify. They also deploy a Botnet of personal computers.

The group first appeared in late 2004 and was given the name “Rock Phish” because the URLs on the group’s sites included a distinctive subdirectory named “rock,”- a technique since abandoned once phishing filters began looking for the word.

However, no-one knows where Rock Phish is based, or if it is a group or just one individual or whether it operates out of a single country or more.